- Posts
Prof Jonathan Bamber on the challenge of understanding sea level rise
Carbon Brief : Feb 14 2019
Prof Jonathan Bamber on tipping points for Greenland and Antarctic glaciers
Carbon Brief : Feb 14 2019
UN climate talks failing to address urgency of crisis, says top scientist
COP25 in Madrid criticised for focusing on details instead of agreeing deep cuts to emissions
Fiona Harvey : The Guardian : Sun 8 Dec 2019
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/08/un-climate-talks-are-failing-to-see-urgency-of-crisis-says-scientist
Extinction Rebellion in Madrid during the COP25 climate summit. Photograph: Javier Barbancho/ReutersUrgent UN talks on tackling the climate emergency are still not addressing the true scale of the crisis, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has warned, as high-ranking ministers from governments around the world began to arrive in Madrid for the final days of negotiations.
Talks are focusing on some of the rules for implementing the 2015 Paris agreement, but the overriding issue of how fast the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions has received little official attention.
“We are at risk of getting so bogged down in incremental technicalities at these negotiations that we forget to see the forest for the trees,” said Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “There is a risk of disappointment in the UN process because of the inability to recognise that there is an emergency.”…
A-Z of climate anxiety: how to avoid meltdown
With the climate emergency putting our mental health at risk, Emma Beddington presents an everyday guide to eco wellbeing
Emma Beddington : The Guardian : Sun 8 Dec 2019
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/08/a-z-of-climate-anxiety-how-to-avoid-meltdown
Up in smoke: ‘Eco anxiety is a legitimate reaction to the climate crisis.’ Illustration: Phil Hackett/The ObserverAnxiety
Much like the planet, people have a tipping point. Mine came last summer, when a respected scientist told me matter-of-factly that he thought it was “at least highly unlikely” that his teenage children would survive beyond late middle age. At that point, three decades of climate unease crystallised into debilitating dread, and I’m far from alone.“There are hundreds of people contacting us, looking for support,” says Caroline Hickman of the Climate Psychology Alliance. It’s not just individuals either. “We’ve reached a level where organisations are asking for professional help to support their staff: civil servants, museums, universities… They’re noticing massive increases in anxiety and concern.”
Eco anxiety isn’t pathological: it’s a legitimate reaction to the climate crisis. “It’s mentally healthy to feel this way,” says Hickman. “It’s a sign of empathy.” The real problem is how we manage our feelings…
Is Rog still here at BPL? I put a reminder in my GoogleCalendar and it went off recently…
It’s looking bad for him in our bet. Here is his much-vaunted WoodForTrees index from 2005 to 2020 as specified, and a linear regression:
Link: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2005/to:2020/trend/plot/wti/from:2005/to:2020/every
Recall that the bet was for USD$1000, if positive slope from 2005 to 2020 I win, else Rog wins. Slope is obviously positive, there.
The other form of the bet was if a majority of the four major indices showed positive slope I win. Here you go:
Or, if you want to wait a year for the 2020 data to be included instead of 2020 being an endpoint (since I don’t think we specified that), I can wait, Rog.
Dean’s back!
Rog sort of petered out. It was coincident with Robert posting so many articles, may be casual.
And he got pissed off at me and cursed which led to a warning by BPL. His postings kind of dwindled after that.
Maybe his position became untenable so he gave up. Is he still going to global warming denier conferences I wonder? Did the British ever give him back his computers after they busted him for having those private emails from global warming scientists?
No, I am not back. I should have specified this in the last post- I will never post in this thread again, unless Rog specifies he would like to wait another year. I’m just going to sit back and let those graphs speak for themselves regarding the bet. But kudos to Robert for taking up the struggle. If Rog is willing to man up and pay out he can PM me. Otherwise, I expect some sort of cherry-picking response from him, or some attempt to change the parameters of the bet, or something, and I won’t engage him on it because it’s futile to do that with True Believers.
I doubt that he “gave up”- too much financial stake and belief perseverance already for that. Is his denier website still up? The one where he solicits “donations”? Him being the guy who has the chuzpah to accuse the worlds’ climate scientists of a financial motivation for continuing the “Vast Environmental Conspiracy”? Funny, that.
You’re back in that you just posted. Several times : )
In “Merchants of Doubt” they opine about what motivates the deniers. Yeah, money is a factor. Some are just mercenaries. Yeah, Rog gets donations. But in Merchants of Doubt they think the main factor is a fear of change. Like financial. If you don’t let cigarette companies make money, it risks the entire capitalist economic system.
Another is just personal. If Rog can prove he’s right and climate scientists are wrong, then he’s better than them.
as per Rog: attempting to claim scientific credibility (for ‘moons circling Jupiter’ crackpot warming causality) in the face of ongoing realities has become impossible. And no one cares any more about his other worries concerning Sharia courts taking over the British legal system and all the rest of that passing hysterical sham. In any case I don’t see this mentioned as an issue in the upcoming elections.
But wait I’m wrong: Brexit is about how the Others are coming to destroy Britishness. My bad.
Hail Britannia! With better food, due to its legal immigrants!
Grumble. Ok, I guess I’m posting more.
@Roger: I re-read the bet and it just says “2005 to 2020”, doesn’t it? Did I miss the bit about the “end” of 2020? I would assume that I set my GoogleCalendar reminder for now for a reason. But I could be wrong.2020 is a bit vague. But 30-Dec-2020 is most certainly the last possible expiry date for the bet.
Eh, what have you got to lose by waiting another couple of weeks? We await the outcome of the bet.Cheers
My respects to Dean.
The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback
Report finds sweeping changes underway across the Arctic
Andrew Freedman : The Washington Post : December 10
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/12/10/arctic-may-have-crossed-key-threshold-emitting-billions-tons-carbon-into-air-long-dreaded-climate-feedback/
Permafrost, seen at the top of the cliff, melts into the Kolyma River outside Zyryanka, Russia, on July 4. Melting permafrost is altering Siberia’s landscape and economy. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)The Arctic is undergoing a profound, rapid and unmitigated shift into a new climate state, one that is greener, features far less ice and emits greenhouse gas emissions from melting permafrost, according to a major new federal assessment of the region released Tuesday.
The consequences of these climate shifts will be felt far outside the Arctic in the form of altered weather patterns, increased greenhouse gas emissions and rising sea levels from the melting Greenland ice sheet and mountain glaciers.
The findings are contained in the 2019 Arctic Report Card, a major federal assessment of climate change trends and impacts throughout the region. The study paints an ominous picture of a region lurching to an entirely new and unfamiliar environment…
UN: Renewables Are Needed Now More Than Ever
Haley Zaremba : OilPrice : Dec 10, 2019
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/UN-Renewables-Are-Needed-Now-More-Than-Ever.htmlLast week, the Secretary General of the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference COP25 told the gathered world leaders in his audience that “By the end of the coming decade we will be on one of two paths. One is the path of surrender, where we have sleep walked past the point of no return, jeopardizing the health and safety of everyone on this planet. Do we really want to be remembered as the generation that buried its head in the sand, that fiddled while the planet burned? The other option is the path of hope.”
So far, however, the “path of hope” and “sustainable solutions” has not been met with nearly enough support, funding, or serious resolve. In order to meet curb global carbon emissions before we reach what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified as a tipping point toward irreversible catastrophic climate change, we need to decarbonize the global economy with a sense of urgency and haste that has so far been found extremely lacking in global seats of power.
Now, the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) has calculated exactly how much renewable energy will need to be installed by 2030 if we are to get on track to take the UN’s path of hope. Irena “believes 7.7TW of operational renewable capacity will be needed by 2030 if the world is to limit global warming to ‘well below’ 2C above pre-industrial levels, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement,” reports Wind Power Monthly. “However, at present, countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) amount to 3.2TW of renewable installations by 2030, up from 2.3TW currently deployed.”…
“We are desperate for any sign of hope,” Greta Thunberg tells UN climate negotiators
Youth activists are growing frustrated with world leaders at the COP25 climate conference in Madrid.
Umair Irfan : Vox : Dec 11, 2019
https://www.vox.com/2019/12/11/21010673/cop25-greta-thunberg-climate-change-un-meeting-madrid
Ugandan climate activist Hilda Flavia Nakabuye speaking Monday at the United Nations climate meeting in Madrid, Spain. Juan Carlos Lucas/NurPhoto/Getty ImagesMADRID — Climate activists grew impatient Wednesday with the slow grind of negotiations at the UN climate conference, where countries are trying to cement the rules for hitting their targets under the Paris climate agreement.
“You’ve been negotiating for the last 25 years, even before I was born,” said Hilda Flavia Nakabuye, a 22-year-old activist from Uganda, during a high-level plenary session with negotiators. “I’d rather fail my exams than fail my generation,” she added, in defense of her choice to skip school on Friday to join fellow students in weekly climate strikes.
This year’s meeting is the twenty-fifth session of the Conference of Parties, hence its name the COP25, and it comes after a global surge in youth-led climate activism, including the largest environmental protest in history in September. It also follows a fresh batch of scientific reports highlighting the devastating impacts climate change is already having on land and oceans as countries drift further away from the goals of limiting warming under the Paris agreement.
“Finding holistic solutions is what the COP should be all about, but instead it seems to have turned into some kind of opportunity for countries to negotiate loopholes and to avoid raising their ambition,” Swedish youth climate activist Greta Thunberg told conference members…
“2020 is a bit vague”
@Roger– Yes, that’s what I’m saying, it’s vague. But I figured I had set my google calendar alert to now for some reason. But I can’t remember, frankly.Fighting climate change, protecting nature go hand in hand
Laure Fillon : Phys.Org : Dec. 13 2019
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-nature.html
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg gives a speech at the COP25 climate change conference in Madrid where some say the struggle to protect nature needs to get more attentionThe preservation of Earth’s pristine wildernesses and oceans, long treated as a separate issue to curbing climate change, is taking on more importance as scientists say they really need to go hand in hand.
The year 2020 will be crucial as nations submit their commitments to the fight to curb global warming ahead of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
At the same time, they will also be drawing up their plans for protecting biodiversity over the next decade in preparation for the COP15 summit in China.
While the focus at COP25 in Madrid these past two weeks has been on climate change and the growing urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions, organisers have made an effort to put the natural environment into the mix.
COP25 chair Chile for example has put the stress on protecting our oceans, under threat on all fronts—pollution, acidification, coral loss, over-fishing to name a few.
“We cannot approach global problems in separate compartments, we must look for synergies,” Andres Landerreche, coordinator for the Chilean conference presidency, told AFP.
“It is the first time (at a COP summit) that there are so many official events linked to bio-diversity,” said Alexandra Deprez of the Institute for Durable Development and International Relations (IDDRI)…
Comparison of climate simulations with proxies suggests Arctic sea ice could vanish in summer sooner than expected
Bob Yirka : Phys.org : Dec. 12 2019
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-comparison-climate-simulations-proxies-arctic.html
Credit: CC0 Public DomainA team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in South Korea and one from the U.S. has found evidence that Arctic sea ice in the summer could vanish sooner than climate models suggest. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes comparing their simulations with real-world proxies and what they found.
As the planet continues to warm unabated, scientists attempt to predict what will happen with the planet and wildlife in coming years. In this new effort, the researchers focused on ice melt in the Arctic. Currently, there is so much sea ice in the Arctic and temperatures are cool enough in summers that the ice does not completely melt. Climate models suggest that at some point in the near future, all of the Arctic sea ice will melt each summer. In this new effort, the researchers suggest that it will be sooner than climate models have been suggesting. The work involved exploring why proxy data shows the planet heating
up more during a prior global warming period 6,000 to 8,000 years ago (called the Holocene thermal maximum) than current climate models. Proxies are things such as preserved pollen or ice cores from a given time period that give hints about temperatures during that period—since humans were not able to record temperatures at the time, scientists use these proxies instead.The work by the researchers in Korea involved running 13 climate models to learn more about the thermal maximum, and then comparing what they showed with proxies. They report that they found that the most up-to-date simulations showed a bigger decline in Arctic sea ice than older models (because the ice would have continued melting into early winter), possibly explaining the discrepancy between proxy data and older simulations. They further suggest that their findings do not bode well for the current warming trend, because it suggests that Arctic sea ice will begin vanishing sooner than older climate models have predicted—and less ice means less energy reflection, contributing to faster global warming.
Arctic Ocean could be ice-free for part of the year as soon as 2044
Katharine Reich : Phys.org : Nov. 15 2019
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-arctic-ocean-ice-free-year.html
The fate of Arctic sea ice is a key topic for climate scientists because of its role in temperatures around the rest of the world. Credit: NASAIt’s hard to imagine the Arctic without sea ice.
But according to a new study by UCLA climate scientists, human-caused climate change is on track to make the Arctic Ocean functionally ice-free for part of each year starting sometime between 2044 and 2067.
As long as humans have been on Earth, the planet has had a large cap of sea ice at the Arctic Circle that expands each winter and contracts each summer. The knowledge that sea ice is on the decline is not new: Satellite observations show that since 1979, the amount of sea ice in the Arctic in September—the month when there is the least sea ice, before water starts freezing again— has declined by 13 percent per decade.
Scientists have been attempting to predict the future of Arctic sea ice for several decades, relying on an array of global climate models that simulate how the climate system will react to all of the carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. But the models’ predictions have disagreed widely. Among the current generation of models, some show ice-free Septembers as early as 2026; others suggest the phenomenon will begin as late as 2132.
The UCLA study, which was published in Nature Climate Change, focuses the predictions to a 25-year period.
Graphic illustrating why the Arctic is changing so fast and how soon Arctic seas might be ice-free. Credit: UCLA Center for Climate ScienceThe study’s lead author is Chad Thackeray, an assistant researcher at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability’s Center for Climate Science. He said one reason predictions about sea ice loss diverge so much is that they differ in how they consider a process called sea ice albedo feedback, which occurs when a patch of sea ice completely melts, uncovering a seawater surface that’s darker and absorbs more sunlight than ice would have. That change in the surface’s reflectivity of sunlight, or albedo, causes greater local warming, which in turn leads to further ice melt.
The cycle exacerbates warming—one reason the Arctic is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the globe.
For their study, Thackeray and co-author Alex Hall, a UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, set out to determine which models are most realistic in how they weigh the effects of sea ice albedo feedback, which they figured would lead them to the most realistic projections for sea ice loss…
“Arctic Ocean could be ice-free for part of the year as soon as 2044”
I bet that’s conservative. It will actually happen sooner than that. Based on other such predictions that climate scientists have made in the past.
When will the Arctic see its first ice-free summer?
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio : Carbon Brief : Dec. 12 2019 : 2:20
An example of how we subsidize fossil fuels. The oil companies do not have to fully insure losses if the oil tanks rupture in an earthquake. The losses would be huge. The government will be forced to pay for this. There is no similar risk for windmills or solar panels. If you truly wanted to compare costs, you’d have to take things like this into account.
https://www.portlandmercury.com/feature/2019/11/21/27511074/on-shaky-ground
“For decades, Portland politicians, scientists, and activists have known our region—which spans the Cascadia Subduction Zone—has been long overdue for a massively destructive earthquake. ”
“When the earthquake hits, Portland could be the site of the largest oil spill in the history of the world.”
“That threat is thanks to the Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub (CEI Hub), a six-mile strip of land in Northwest Portland—bordered by Northwest St Helens Road and the Willamette River—that is home to at least 10 fuel storage terminals owned by companies like Chevron, BP, and Kinder Morgan. With a combined storage capacity of 360 million gallons, the hub is home to 90 percent of Oregon’s fuel supply. This congregation of heavy tanks is located on a liquefaction zone, an area of soil prone to liquify, sink, and expand after an earthquake. When the quake hits, the hub’s heavy fuel tanks could easily come unmoored, spilling their contents into the Willamette and possibly setting Forest Park ablaze.”
“But there is one thing environmental advocates know: If a Portland-area earthquake were to occur tomorrow, the private companies that own facilities in the CEI Hub would not be held responsible for the full cost of the damage.”
““These risks are very, very large, so it is hard to insure them, particularly when you know you’re sitting in a place with serious earthquake risks,” says Dan Serres, director of the Columbia Riverkeeper, a nonprofit that works to protect and restore the Columbia River. “They haven’t been forced to internalize it. There’s no law that says ‘If you’re going to create these risks, you’re going to have to deal with it.’””
I think that is basically the argument that poor island nations are using, with good reason, to ask the developed nations to help pay for the accumulated effects of their CO2 emissions over the years, which in some cases are making the island nations uninhabitable. Capitalism is not willing to take responsibility for the effects of its single-minded pursuit of wealth. So we all have to suffer the consequences.
I think to be fair, that should be widened to include Communism, and for that matter, Socialism. But of whatever political ideology, the pretense that human settlement and activity does not affect the environment, or at least does not do so significantly, can no longer be sustained. The deleterious effects it has at the scale of population density we adopt have to be taken responsibility for, taken account of, prevented where possible, reduced, mitigated.
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